Our crew has been fairly skeletal these past two weeks. We are fortunate enough to call the Great Lakes home and that means summer is our reward for surviving the crazy long and cold days of winter. We take full advantage of the sunshine and blue skies because we know what lies ahead…
As the days of summer draw to a close –boo hoo– we are working hard on finalizing Q4 plans for our clients. Most of them know the drill well and trust us to manage the process for them. But we have a few new clients that have recently signed on with us after having fallen victim to…a content mill.
We see many things in our work with new clients.
Some have been led astray by bigger agencies who specialize in offline marketing but have tried to join in on the shift to digital. Not very successfully. We work with companies who initially dumped a fortune in to articles and content that is nothing more than an offline brochure thrown up on a website.
While it is tough to see, we know it is largely due to a lack of knowledge on the part of the agency. Not a deliberate attempt to dupe. Unlike the content mills…
Are You a Victim of the Content Mills?
So what the hockey sticks is a content mill?
If you are sipping your 4th cup of coffee for the day or your first glass of wine (no judgment – its 5:00 somewhere right?), you may be asking yourself that very question.
In my mind’s eye, I always flash back to a paper mill that was near my grandparents’ beautiful Kentucky home. My grandpa and I would go by it in the morning when we went to get coffee and a newspaper.
You could watch trees going in at one end of the mill and trucks pulling away loaded with huge rolls of paper at the other end. Every one of them came out the same.
Content mills are similar…
We come up against these nefarious beasts quite often when potential clients ask us for a quote or when we are trying to help a new client who has just parted ways with one.
I wish we had a way to virtually inject them with a little truth serum so we could spare our friends and colleagues a whole lot of grief.
Here’s our description of a content mill as it relates to content marketing for home care, senior living or other aging services providers:
- Prices that are too good to be true. Some as low as $40 per blog.
- They assure you their articles are optimized for SEO.
- They will tell you their content is “unique” but can’t (or won’t) define what they really mean by that.
- They will tell you technically you can request special topics but they advise you to let them handle those details.
- They have “dedicated” senior care writers they will brag to you.
Allow Us to Translate What that Really Means:
- The article they write for you is unique only in that they are changing the headline and shuffling the paragraphs around a bit. Some don’t even bother with the shuffle. It is quite simply duplicate content. And we know how Google feels about that.
- What they are writing for you, is just what they are writing for their other clients. Don’t get me wrong… there are evergreen and trending topics everyone needs in their content mix. The difference lies in their uniqueness. (Here’s a quick video from our friends at Moz if you’d like to learn more about that topic.)
- Most articles are 200 – 300 fluffy, filler words in length. Nothing close to the 400 – 600 words of rich and relevant content of our blog articles.
- Their writing teams are kids straight out of college. They may write exclusively for senior care clients, but most have never stepped foot in one since their grade school choir sang there during the holidays. They certainly don’t understand that Medicare will pay for Part B therapy in an AL apartment (with a physician order) but not for the cost of board and care. And don’t even bother asking about the Aid & Attendance benefit.
- The writers for content mills crank out 10 – 12 articles (or more) each day for very little pay. They are sweat shops without sewing machines, my friends.
Quality versus Quantity
The moral of the story is when it comes to Google, quality always wins.
So as you are hammering away at your 2016 senior living community or home care office budgets (oh how I don’t miss those days…), consider this your public service announcement.
Look for the content teams that are made up of people who understand the decision journey. Who’ve walked the walk with families. Who have been the adult child sandwiched in between their children and their aging parents/grandparents.
Agencies like ours are few and far between but we are out there.
Shelley